NASCAR qualifying procedure needs tweaking

Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images for NASCARKurt Busch won the pole for Sunday's STP 400 at Kansas Speedway. NASCAR's qualifying procedure allows for manipulation of the process and should be changed, says Sporting News NASCAR Wire Service writer Reid Spencer.

By Reid Spencer

Sporting News NASCAR Wire Service

(June 6, 2011)

Do we really want a time-trial format where the favored positions in the qualifying order go to the drivers who are slowest in Friday’s first practice session?

Guess what? That’s already happening, and it will continue to happen until NASCAR tweaks its qualifying procedure.

Juan Pablo Montoya freely acknowledged he manipulated his practice speed on Friday at Kansas Speedway to get an advantageous early draw for Saturday morning’s time trials. It paid off with a front-row starting spot in Sunday’s STP 400.

“I thought we played the game pretty good (Friday),” Montoya said after time trials on Saturday. “We only did one qualifying run (in practice) and actually, when I came out of (Turn) 4, we decided to bail out of it to make sure we went out early. And it paid off big.”

Kyle Busch had one of the fastest cars at Kansas, but he didn’t use the system to his advantage. Having posted one of the fastest times in Friday’s practice, Busch had a late draw on a hotter racetrack and couldn’t match the lap times of Montoya or pole winner Kurt Busch.

“I think teams are getting smarter now and they’re figuring out ways to utilize lap times a little bit differently, so we’ll probably see that in effect here the next few weeks,” Kyle Busch said. “Like next week (at Pocono), I guess it’s just the first practice that counts and it’s Saturday qualifying.

“Guys are going to get smart, and they are going to start manipulating the times—sandbagging is what we call it—in order to get an early draw.”

In the Sprint Cup Series, Pocono will mark a change in qualifying procedure—already in effect in the Nationwide Series and Camping World Truck Series—that will make sandbagging more of a way of life. Drivers required to qualify on speed no longer will be segregated at the end of the session.

Instead, the go-or-go-homers will qualify with drivers in the top 35 in owner points who already are locked into the field. The order in which a driver makes a qualifying run will be determined, across the board, by speed in Friday’s first practice, with the slowest car going out first and the fastest car qualifying last.

That will place an even greater premium on qualifying draw. If time trials take place in the morning, an early draw—when the track is cooler and faster—is the ticket to success. The opposite is true for a Friday afternoon session, where a late draw can take advantage of a track that cools as evening approaches.

Under that scenario, with a Saturday morning session, the slowest cars get to qualify first. Accordingly, it pays to be slow in Friday’s first practice—to a point.

“You still want to try to post a good time, and you really want to see how competitive you are,” Montoya said. “So I’m not sure if everybody is going to do it. You’re still going to have to put down a good practice time in race trim to see how good your car is. So we’ll see.”

If drivers are willing to break off mock qualifying runs in practice to keep their cars at the bottom of the speed charts, however, that sort of manipulation of the system probably won’t sit well with fans of a sport where, ordinarily, the fastest cars rule.

In other words, do we really want a system that rewards the slowest cars in Friday's practice with an opportunity to win the pole? It happened in Kansas, and it's likely to happen next weekend at Pocono.

The fix is simple. Simply allow drivers to pick their spots in the qualifying order based on Friday’s practice speeds, from fastest to slowest—much as teams have their pick of pit stalls based on qualifying results, from fastest to slowest.

Voila! No more sandbagging.

Drivers will have to post the fastest possible laps in practice to get their choice of the most advantageous qualifying draws—and that’s the way it should be.